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Comic work with help of Blender

Hi all,

We are now creating some Chinese style comic using Blender for background design and hand paint for characters. Here's our first issue screenshot and we hope you like it. It is a 32 pages myth story that the boy fall into another world after accidentally pick up a magic Koke can.

To answer all your questions:

1, what renderer we are using
We are using both Cycles and Blender Internal. For scene render we use Cycles to get quick lighting and clean diffuse, and edge render are all finished in BI. We experience FreeStyle but it seems unfinished and more a less for developer not artist to use.

2, our workflow
We take photographs from our city to get enough details references and then use Blender to model everything in our comic for copyright protection. Then use OpenGL render to finish screenplay. Meanwhile we will use BI to get edge render for 2D artist for character reference. After these work done, 3D artist will render the scene in Cycles for solid color and 2D artist will put some touch via Photoshop for details fix. Well that's almost our workflow.

3, will this cost a lot of time?
For this first issue, we have been working for three months as we need to build everything. But once our models lib have been set and all of presents been designed, the next issue will be produced very soon. Just like TheGuardian mentioned, if once scene happened many times in comic like two person talking. This would be easy for us to make the background quick. The first issue is testing our quality, and the next release is to test our speed. I will share how much we will use for the next release. In order to make sure our drawing style stable, we only plan to use 3D to create the background. Most of the time people will need to enjoy the story and character not the background, and we don't want to lost the core of comic as a picture novel. But 3D could make our view more unique and high quality as well as effective, so we plan to stick with it.

4, how many people of our team?
we have 1 lead artist, 1 3D artist, 2 2D artist, 1 story and 1 R&D support, very small team.

We will release more in the future for our comic works. Thanks for all your comments

It's really good. I wonder, tough, to which extent is it beneficial to model the backgrounds opposite to just plainly drawing them or using photos (traced or processed)? This looks like a lot of work - all modeling, texturing and setting materials and rendering. My friend who draws comic uses only rough models to get the perspective and some hard shapes right and then draws all the rest by hand.

It's really good. I wonder, tough, to which extent is it beneficial to model the backgrounds opposite to just plainly drawing them or using photos (traced or processed)? This looks like a lot of work - all modeling, texturing and setting materials and rendering. My friend who draws comic uses only rough models to get the perspective and some hard shapes right and then draws all the rest by hand.

I would imagine the same scene will be used many times in the comic, so drawing the background would merely require a camera location change and then render it out. This could save a good deal of time, whether it makes up for all the work of initially modeling it probably depends on the artist's skill level. Which looks to be pretty high ;-) Regardless, these are some impressive results.

As an painting artist i wonder, doesnt this take an awful amount of time to create a commic this way ?

Dough i think if your planning to make a movie, you now got a 3d story board.
but still to sketch a story i'dd advice to use pencils,
also you can get much done with a ruler and paper if your hand isnt steady enough.

However lately i've come to know drawing artist (comics) who exclusively draw on computers, and cannt draw on paper.
And although they get some effects more easily, i think part of the spirit of creating commics is drawing style.
The reason for that is like the people you love, you like to share how you vieuw the world, which is best done with a human hand and basic drawing tools pen pencil paper ink or water color. I am not telling you your doing wrong either dough, but it might be much more difficult to create a style and to keep evolve a style over a few years.. Dough i am wondered where you will get with this, and if your willing to stick with it, in other words take it as a job, since cartoon drawing is on decline since the age of kids electronics.
Oh well maybe you better use it to create kids games computer games.

This is amazing work. Regarding the hand-draw club; absolutely... the brain of the artist is always key, but this is true whether they use digital media or not. Digital becomes a problem if it's seen as some kind of a sort cut from hard work. Much of the art which inspires does so because we can see the work that must have gone into it. The work seen here doesn't suffer at all from lack of work ethic.

I don't think comics are dying either; Stan Lee is extremely employable these days. At this end of the globe, traditional artists like Greg Broadmore, Ben Stenbeck, Dylan Coburn, Warren Mahy, Christian Pearce (to name only a few) are among a number of project-critival artists in Weta Digitals movie pipeline.